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Output repository for foi-ph-scraper and subsequent analysis of FOI requests in the Philippines.

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foi-analysis

Output repository of scraped information from foi-ph-scraper. A data analysis of FOI requests in the Philippines.

Recent updates

date update
Jan. 24 Updated data as of January 10, 2023
Nov 11 Updated data as of November 7, 2022
Sept 12 Updated data as of September 6, 2022

What is this?

An analysis of FOI requests data scraped by foi-ph-scraper from the FOI website of the Philippines.

How it works

CSVs in the output directory are automatically updated each Sunday when the autoscraper pushes newly scraped information from the website. Files are overwritten by new ones, but CSVs are generated with a unique file name each time the scraper runs to avoid losing older data.

For instance, if the scraper runs on February 8, it will have that latest data plus other entries before that so long as the scraped info do not exceed 3,000 entries as the scraper intends to do. The scraper is designed that way since one, older data from 2016 are already saved in a separate CSV. Two, this is to avoid scraping the entire site again which results in failure to scrape due to size.

Hence every week, new CSVs are added to the directory. Use the Jupyter Notebook to merge all those with older data from 2016 (contained in CSV with file name foi_final for analysis.

The process

  1. Download everything into one path in your computer. Open Jupyter Notebook and run foi-analysis.ipynb.

  2. The current notebook only read foi_final.csv through pandas in default. To add newly-scraped requests files, you need to read the other CSVs in output directory, generate data frames out of them and concat them with the first data frame.

  3. Run analysis through pandas.

Definition of terms

The following information were scraped from the website:

column name definition
agency the name of the government agency where the request was submitted
date date when request was made through the FOI portal
status shows at which stage of the FOI process is the file request in. Examples are "SUCCESSFUL", "PARTIALLY SUCCESSFUL", "DENIED", etc.
date date when request was made through the FOI portal
period_covered a required information when filing a request meant to serve as filter for the extent of period covered by each request
purpose the purpose why the request is being made, typically indicating how the data will be used. This is required when filing an FOI request
link hyperlink to each FOI request, containing details and direct messages between the filer and agency concerned. Only available for data from December 7, 2021
reasons_denial a brief reason cited for a denial of request. Only available for data from 2016-December 31, 2021

Requirements

  • Python: pandas, regex

Contact

Prinz Magtulis, [email protected]

Comments and suggestions are always welcome! All rights reserved.

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Output repository for foi-ph-scraper and subsequent analysis of FOI requests in the Philippines.

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